


Darkroom

by Kanja



Category: Far Cry 3
Genre: Blood and Gore, Explicit Language, Explicit Sexual Content, M/M, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-27
Updated: 2014-07-27
Packaged: 2018-02-10 16:14:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,911
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2031543
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kanja/pseuds/Kanja
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jason's never lost his love for photography. Vaas is happy to help.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Darkroom

"These are really fucking nice."

 

On one hand, Jason Brody is standing in the cutout doorway of his improvised darkroom, the familiar weight of a rifle in his hand and the visage of his dearest enemy locked in his sights. On the other, he is surrounded by the sacred relics of his path -- photographs of that unwitting cassowary whose plumage decorates his arrows now, pirates caught in candid moments, sharing lighters, reclined along a perimeter with their shirts tied up and their masks slung over their shoulders, the Amanaki dancers with their serpentine silhouettes rising like smoke from a central fire.

 

Hung up to dry is a black and white panoramic of an underground pagoda. Jason had been working for Buck then, who was helplessly enamored with the history of the place. It wasn't the story that had Jason so entranced, but the burst of vines through an immortal bulwark of stone, the faint play of smoke and shadow from the acid pits that turned a rotting plank bridge into a forbidden dreamland.

 

He has no clue how Vaas found this place. It used to house a relic of some power; that has long since been returned to Citra, proudly displayed before her altar. When Citra mounts him, they both see it, immersed by the icons of Jason's warrior might. He came back afterwards, still dreaming of the place, chased out a nest of hissing dragons, and took advantage of its cool, dry darkness. Some lines were hung, some water purified and stocked in three gallon drums against the wall.

 

And now there is Vaas too, who scrutinizes a portrait of a Somali pirate as glimpsed through the glittering vapor of a waterfall. That pirate is dead now, but the perfect aesthetics of that moment are forever immortalized, pinched between Vaas's fingers with a particular care that Jason does not expect. "The composition..." he mumurs, "the lighting, the depth -- it's a good fucking angle. I remember this fucking asshole." Vaas looks at him. "Do you always take pictures of the men you kill?"

 

Jason leans his hip against the wall. His rifle doesn't leave his hands, but it is at ease by his side, like a loyal hound.

 

"Are you stealing their souls?" Vaas's tone is incredibly derisive. He makes Jason feel self-conscious before he can help it. "Do you think I am so fucking stupid I cannot see what you are doing, hermano?"

 

Vaas takes a half-step forward, and Jason feels it like Vaas is pressed against him. He tries to keep the shudder out of his breathing, but some things cannot be helped. With Vaas, there is just too much going on. Jason is too emotional, too angry, and too intrigued -- especially now that Vaas has picked out all his best work, recognizing the very nuanced details that makes them intimately Jason's, the details that he has captured purposefully, that he possesses through his lens. Jason keeps an eye on Vaas, steady, always steady, like a hunter should be.

 

"I'll tell you what, motherfucker," Vaas sneers, hands gliding through the air in that dancer elegance characteristic of him. "I am going to give you a gift. You'd better fucking appreciate what I am going to do for you. You will not have long to enjoy it -- yeah? Because I'm gonna cut your belly, white boy." The dark depravity of what he is saying is well-matched by his shadowy, smoky tone. "I'm gonna hang you upside down and empty you out like a pretty white  _vacatita_. I'll pack up your heart in a nice little box and feed your fucking skin to the cannibals in the mountains."

 

Entrenched in the heavy atmosphere, Jason exhales very, very slowly. Vaas's face is an inch from his. Vaas could kiss him or bite into his eyes, blacking out the world for him forever. Jason has no clue which to expect -- or which he longs for. Whichever will end the  _fucking tension_ building in his gut.

 

Vaas doesn't touch him; Jason assumes that he never will. It's always the pirates that do the grabbing, the manhandling. Vaas prefers to possess him like smoke, a touchless presence in his hair and eyes and mouth. 

 

"Fuck you," Jason growls. 

 

"Fuck me?" Vaas laughs, with nerve enough to sound surprised. "Fuck me? Ohhh, no no-no-no. No no no  _please,_ you ungrateful  _fuck--_   _Phoooo_...Breathe deep. Find your zen." Vaas does. He slams his palms on the wall, bordering Jason's twitching hips. "I'm gonna come back for the pay-off. You better have something fucking beautiful waiting for me."

 

Jason swears an oath on  _never_. By the time he's caught his breath, he's racing up the endless staircase in an attempt to catch up with Vaas, but mysteriously, Vaas is gone.

 

 

 

 

The Rakyat drop Jason off on a faint path that leads into a village. From where Jason is standing, he can see smoke still rising from the squat bamboo shacks, mingling with eaves of woven banana leaves. One of the warriors informs him that the smoke is the souls of the fallen, on their way to their ancestral plane. If the Rakyat are to be believed, the souls are filtering the sunlight into hot white daggers, comprising a once in a lifetime shot. Jason focuses his camera, snaps a picture, and moves on.

 

It is the golden hour, just a few strokes after the sun has risen, the morning diffused as a soft glow upon the stomach-turning wreckage of the village. There has been a massacre here, but Jason's first and foremost thought is the  _hour_. It's too perfect, the lighting's too good. Care has been taken to ascertain that the weather is not a factor. The Rakyat leave him, and Jason drops the facade and entertains his suspicions. 

 

There is a girl, suspended on spears that pierce her flesh and pose her. One of her hands is twisted up behind her, stuck in place by the blade through her bloody hand. Her legs are splayed at an evocative cant. To compile all the most riveting details into one shot, Jason has to face the sun. He captures her as a golden black phantom of agony. 

 

Similarly, a young man sleeps against a wall, the blood from the bullet in his head a sanguine wing that extends four feet above his lifeless body. The red is vivid, the canvas of the wall a stark white to exhibit the hue. The spatter pattern in itself is a masterpiece of serendipity: one long, dominant stripe that feeds into thinning strings, creating a delicate arc, patterned like wrought iron.

 

It goes on and on like that. A woman floats, the laces of her white dress untied, turned to smoky whorls around her head. Another man has been set ablaze, the crumbling vines around his wrists indicating that he was tied so that his corpse would roast with his head buried in the charred black flesh of his hands. All of them have been beautifully murdered, with an insane eye for detail. Jason captures it all on film. 

 

It is beyond madness.

 

Jason takes his time developing the photographs. They're painful to look at and he feels a little bit like Kevin Carter, affected by his oeuvre and dangerously susceptible to the violence that it invokes. He sits for hours as the images bleed through. It's like a nightmare, witnessing the birth of blank eyes and soundlessly screaming mouths.

 

One of them turns out to not be his. The setting of the polaroid is a beach. The water is blue like breathless lips. The sand is scratched with a message: DID YOU LIKE IT?

 

Jason crumples up the photograph and tosses it into a bin. In the morning, he doubts himself and panics and looks for it again.

 

It's gone as if it never existed in the first place.  

 

Whether Jason is losing his mind or not, the massacres continue. The other warriors do not see the subtlety in every spent life, the aesthetic brilliance of their spilled blood and lulling heads, blind to the art of it. To them, these are the spoils of war and nothing else. They mention nothing when another village falls, its population spread around a fire, their flesh mottled with ash paints from the pyre. They see no significance when the treeline outside of the temple becomes a hanging ground, the corpses tied by their necks and hands and feet in ways that straighten or curl their spines, lift or bow their heads, suspend their hands aloft or bind them together in prayer.

 

And always dawn; it's always dawn, the sky always cloudless, so that Jason has every component he needs to get a perfect shot the first time. 

 

Some of the pictures are haunting -- others are haunted. Images he's never seen before appear on his cardstock, always with a message. SICK BEAUTIFUL FUCK, Vaas taunts him from the unearthly place he inhabits in Jason's mind, in his work. RAPE THE LAND. CONSECRATE THE FLESH. A BLOODY REBIRTH.

 

It's too much. 

 

They're always gone the next time he looks for them.

 

 

 

 

Jason is halfway to believing that he's lost his mind on the day that he discovers the door. It's a stealthy thing, actually impossible to see, but he's inhabited his darkroom for so long now that all its working parts have become as familiar to him as the lovers that he keeps. Today, the wind whistles when it shouldn't. The sound leads him to a tiny, imperceptible crack in the stone. Jason taps the hilt of his knife against it until it opens for him, inviting him in. 

 

The path he finds is isolated along a cliff that overlooks the perfect turquoise swell of sea below. Jason has forever been a conditional atheist, daring his maker to meet him with every leap of faith he's ever taken, but if he believed in Eden, this would be it. Just like in the story, it is an untouched paradise of feral flora, a lively, bustling private wilderness that conceals a snake within.

 

That snake is Vaas, of course, who is lounging in a twine hammock suspended between the wicked curve of two banana trees. Jason makes no noise in his approach, but Vaas opens one eye as he nears anyway, very nearly sinning against his own aesthetic composition. 

 

Jason hisses, " _Don't move_."

 

Vaas complies, but his eyes stay on Jason. In turn, Jason lifts his camera and preserves on film the sultry look of his shifted eyes, the smoky mottled flesh that makes his light-flooded iris _burn_. Jason gets on his knees to focus his lens on the granules of grime caught in the tread of his boots, an epic of high-definition grittiness against the decadent, red apparition set against the foreground.

 

Vaas crawls toward him and Jason's shutter goes mad over the swell of his flesh through the braids of the hammock, the splash of tropical blue that occurs when the sunlight reflects in his hair. In perfect resonance, Jason finds Vaas's lips and snaps a shot in the half-second between his dark, dark scowl and his madman's smile. Vaas had asked if Jason was trying to steal the souls of his graphical conquests. If this is what he meant, then he is entirely right. Only Jason knows how to capture Vaas honestly, his camera clicking in the spaces between the predatory poising and the loud exhibitions.

 

There is more: the ripple of Vaas's muscles, resplendent with a thin sheen of sweat, as he pulls his shirt up over his head. The strong compilation of his physique as he arches his back for Jason's camera, one hand buried in his hair and his mouth all soft. In film, it is beautiful, silent debauchery; beyond the lens, Vaas is taunting him, laughing at him, rubbing his hands all over his body and asking if Jason likes it.

 

Jason thrusts him against a tree so that he can exploit the press of Vaas's hard, muscled belly against the staccato bark. There is a scar at the junction of his hip and stomach; Jason tries three angles before he realizes that he will not get the shot that he wants. He quietly improvises, leaning in to Vaas's flesh, suckling the scar until it is darker and brighter. His core burns with pleasure at the surprised sound that Vaas makes, at the hands in his hair that he shoves away.

 

"Don't move," he says again, and gets his shot. It's even more beautiful because Vaas's lips have parted, his shoulders hitching with hard breaths. The effect is tripled when Jason undoes Vaas's belt from behind. By the time that Jason turns him, Vaas's flesh is awash with raised pin points. Jason lets his pants sag down his spine until it catches on a lifted curve and shoots the peeking contour of Vaas's bare cock through the dropped fabric and the fuzzy nest of hair. 

 

Vaas lifts his hands up high and wiggles his hips until his trousers fall upon his boots. Jason catches his teasing grin in profile, looking blood-spattered from the red shine of his beard in the light. 

 

Vaas backs him down and steals space on his lap. Jason rakes his fingers into the sand below and spreads it across Vaas's chest, his camera capturing the resplendent sweep of grainy white across the irresistible dark hues of Vaas's skin. They are both so far gone that Jason hardly protests when his camera is taken and pointed right back at him. 

 

"You can see how much you want me now, white boy," Vaas hisses, as if Jason needs persuading to allow this voyeurism to continue. "How bad you want to cram your cock into my lovely fucking chocha."

 

Vaas uses the fallen fruit around them, their juices sweet and cold and thick and dribbling down Jason's swollen cock, pooling in his hair. The stickiness draws their flesh together and Jason nearly loses his mind over it. All the while, his camera is still snapping.

 

"Your slutty fucking faces are making my little pussy ache, Jason. Are you a _fucking man_? _Dame_ , you piece of shit, show me what you _fucking have_..."

 

Jason turns the camera back on Vaas as his mouth falls open. His cock punches deep into Vaas's guts, beating back the tight walls of his muscles with every rising stroke. Vaas rides him so hard that Jason's thighs are slapped red. They scratch and tear at one another, flesh weeping blood and sweat.

 

" _Cógeme_ ," Vaas is urging him, his voice deep in his throat and building and building. " _Ayyyyy sí, sí sigue, cógeme duro_ _motherfucker piece of shit, duro... duro... duro..._ "

 

Jason rocks his hips and lifts Vaas high up off the ground, impaled. That is when Vaas's head snaps back, his fingers tunneling around his leaky cock, milking desperately as deep, bright pangs of pleasure wrack his body from being stuffed so full. Vaas comes with a poetic lilt that Jason will never be able to decipher, but it doesn't matter. The spattered fluid between them is enough of a context clue, and Jason responds in kind by dragging his fingers through the mess, wiping them across Vaas's lips to compel him to take a suck.

 

Vaas does, so Jason leads him by his tongue to the ground, unkindly unsatisfied until Vaas is on all fours. Now, Vaas's body opens for him, inviting his cock, slurping it for him as Jason pounds his ass hard enough to make Vaas tear at the sand below. Jason's body is groaning and aching from every loud, delirious crack of flesh upon flesh. Jason hears himself moaning and dazedly slips out of Vaas's glorious heat, pumping his cock until he's dressed Vaas's back with gobs of white. 

 

" _Don't move_ ," he gasps again, fumbling with his camera. He does not relax until he has captured not only the image, but the depravity of sticky fluids sinking into skin, the stark contrast between the pools of white and the sun-kissed plane. 

 

"Sick fuck," Vaas laughs. It isn't so funny when he feels the dripping. "Hijo de _puta madre_ motherfucker -- why do you have to make such a fucking mess? You better have a _pinche towel_ for me--"

 

"Oh,  _me_?" Jason laughs. "Me, make a mess?"

 

" _What_ ," Vaas demands.

 

"At least my messes don't stain," Jason says. "Not like blood."

 

Vaas's eyes narrow. When Jason comes nearer, Vaas looks ready to push him away. "That is not a  _mess_ , cabrón," he argues. "That is _fucking_ _art_."

 

" _Ah._ " Jason drags his fingers down Vaas's spine, raking trenches through the sticky stains on his back. "Then so is this."

 

"We are fucking brilliant," Vaas sighs. "When this is over, pendejo, when you are dead in the ground and finally have the fucking sense to not crawl out again, people will think I am crazy for destroying my muse."

 

Jason thinks back to his friends in the cavern with the long looks on their faces, to the macabre gallery in his darkroom, to the times he's caught himself whooping and gloating over a throat slit in silence or a Jeep launched into the air on the back of an explosion. He thinks that Vaas is wrong, but only because people will think that they are crazy far, far before either of them are ever destroyed. 

 

And because he is sure, now more than ever, that this grotesque collaboration will end only when his work is done.

**Author's Note:**

> *vacatita - in spanish, when something is cute or tiny or we are being pricks, we sometimes add a diminutive suffix like -ita. this is essentially "little cow" in english.
> 
> *cabrón, pendejo, hijo de puta - affectionate nicknames for good friends.
> 
> *ay papi si sigue cógeme duro - way to go, pal! keep up the good work!


End file.
